I have had had several small capacitors explode while I was studying EE.

I heard a really big capacitor explode once - ten feet from the receiving end of a phone call. I believe that one was around 1000 farads (yes, it was installed with a forklift).

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BOINC WIKI

And now after a few days, stability seems to have increased significantly, but any task (number crunching or not) that gets put onto the second CPU seems to suffer dramatically. Quite obvious to see in BOINC. Two tasks will be going along at the expected pace, and the other two take about 50% longer. Also, if I multitask too much, everything locks up for 10-60 seconds and then resumes. May have something to do with ECC, may not. I think I'm going to turn ECC off and see if that makes any difference. If not, then I'm pulling the second CPU. Two cores are fine for what I do on a daily basis.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Okay, so I disabled ECC and noticed something interesting. Windows reported only 2.5gb of RAM instead of ~3.2. Did not seem to make any difference in threads/processes that run on the second CPU, so I finally just pulled it out a little while ago. It's going to take some getting used to for a single-threaded process using a whole core to show as 50% instead of 25.

Power consumption according to the UPS has gone down a bit, as well. 173w idle, 227w load. I guess that answers that question that I had a while back about the listed wattage that CPUs use. Somewhere along the line I had read that for instance, my CPUs are listed as 119w, and what I had read was that was what they use at idle, and full-load can be upwards of twice as much as that. For that reason, I had always assumed that my power supply was just about maxed, seeing as I'd be looking at about 480 watts for all four cores being at max, but then this UPS was only showing like 335 for the whole system. Guess that means the wattage spec is what it draws at full load, since I removed one and the UPS load dropped about 100 watts.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Final verdict: 5 years, and this system is just tired and worn out. No saving it at this point. When I push my array (add-on Areca card in a PCI-e x16 slot) and use it to the max, the 'system' process just kind of locks up.

Since Bulldozer is somewhat disappointing, and I don't have much money, I'm looking at some cheap options for doing something with an 1100T. DDR3 prices are amazing right now. HDD prices on the other hand.. ouch. I don't have to replace my C drive, but I want to. It's a 6-year-old 80gb PATA that gets 30-40MB/sec for read/write. It's a bit slow when starting the system up. I want something that gives at least 60MB/sec.

All of my storage drives do 85-115 (1 500gb, 2 640gb, 3 1tb, and my 4x500 array runs 120-225 for read, and I never benchmarked write). I figure if I'm doing a partial new build, I should upgrade the OS drive, too.

I think I may have a SATA drive floating around in some other system. Need to check on that and benchmark it to see if it's good enough.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

I don't have much money,

Pitty, smaller capacity SSDs can be had for very good prices, and their performance can't really be compared with a HDDs- the HDDs are that much slower.

Keep in mind the F100 is OK as SSDs go, where as the VelociRaptor is the king of desktop HDDs.
SSD v HDD

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Grant
Darwin NT

I don't have much money,

Pitty, smaller capacity SSDs can be had for very good prices, and their performance can't really be compared with a HDDs- the HDDs are that much slower.

Keep in mind the F100 is OK as SSDs go, where as the VelociRaptor is the king of desktop HDDs.
SSD v HDD

Yeah, my original plan was to make this ailing rig become a 24TB RAID6 storage server and the new build was going to be bulldozer and I was going to go with two 300gb velociraptors in raid0 for my OS and programs drive. Apparently, because of that flood debacle in Taiwan, HDD prices went astronomical. Friend of mine had a 1tb Deskstar in his shopping cart on newegg for 49.99, and two days later when he went to order, it was 249. The suppliers jacked the prices way up, and the vendors follow suit.

I like the idea of SSDs being fast, but I still don't trust the limited write cycles on each byte. My idea of an SSD is something like HyperDrive 5. "Not RAM-like performance, IS RAM performance."

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

I don't have much money,

Pitty, smaller capacity SSDs can be had for very good prices, and their performance can't really be compared with a HDDs- the HDDs are that much slower.

Keep in mind the F100 is OK as SSDs go, where as the VelociRaptor is the king of desktop HDDs.
SSD v HDD

Yeah, my original plan was to make this ailing rig become a 24TB RAID6 storage server and the new build was going to be bulldozer and I was going to go with two 300gb velociraptors in raid0 for my OS and programs drive. Apparently, because of that flood debacle in Taiwan, HDD prices went astronomical. Friend of mine had a 1tb Deskstar in his shopping cart on newegg for 49.99, and two days later when he went to order, it was 249. The suppliers jacked the prices way up, and the vendors follow suit.

I like the idea of SSDs being fast, but I still don't trust the limited write cycles on each byte. My idea of an SSD is something like HyperDrive 5. "Not RAM-like performance, IS RAM performance."

I managed to be super lucky on the price hike business. I had ordered a new 750GB 2.5" drive for my HTPC on Friday October 14th for $90. Then the following week the price had shot up over $200.

Prices on some drives have come back down so that is good. The 300GB Velociraptor I was looking at for $180 is back down to $200. So maybe by tax refund time prices will have dropped down a bit more.

Edit: I refreshed the page I was looking at on buy.com for the drive and the price dropped from $199.99 to $189.99. $150 and it's mine! lol

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

When I built me newest SETI cruncher (see "Green" in my sig) I decided to try a small SSD to see how it worked out. So I picked up a 30GB OCZ Vertex. Once I got Windows 7, drivers/misc programs and Boinc installed I ended up with about 11GB remaining. The speed of Windows 7 install and booting has been great!

Currently I'm not running a hard drive along with it, so there really isn't room to add anything, but for use as only a cruncher its cheap, fast, and works great!

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My Computers:
â–ˆ Blue Offline
â–ˆ Green Offline
â–ˆ Red Offline

When I built me newest SETI cruncher (see "Green" in my sig) I decided to try a small SSD to see how it worked out. So I picked up a 30GB OCZ Vertex. Once I got Windows 7, drivers/misc programs and Boinc installed I ended up with about 11GB remaining. The speed of Windows 7 install and booting has been great!

Currently I'm not running a hard drive along with it, so there really isn't room to add anything, but for use as only a cruncher its cheap, fast, and works great!

The hybrid drives look interesting -- this one's getting good reviews:

http://www.ebuyer.com/222310-seagate-500gb-momentus-xt-2-5-hybrid-ssd-hdd-sata-ii-7200rpm-32mb-cache-st95005620as#reviews
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/29/gen_2_momentus_xt/

Misfortunately, I don't have a use-case to justify getting one for testing...

Okay, it was worth a shot. There were five more 820uF caps that were bulged, and the big 3300 next to the second bank of RAM that I replaced already was bulged as well.

When I bought caps the last time, it was a 10-pack, so I had enough left over to do some more surgery. I went ahead and took the advice given after the first time and just wiggled/pried the bad caps off and left their leads still soldered into the board. Put the new caps onto the old leads and bent them out of the way.

Didn't fix anything. The 'system' process still locks up after ~1GB of writing to the array. Was hoping it would be another band-aid for a few months, but I feel there are larger issues than just simple cap replacements. Hopefully I'm going to get paid soon for the past two weeks of work that I've done, and that should be enough money for a new mobo/cpu/ram.

Depending on the mobo, I may need to get a silicon image 3132 card for port-multiplier support, and I have to have two gigabit NICs. I was looking at an ASRock board due to its low price, but the second gigabit NIC would have to be that legacy PCI variety due to the limited number of PCI-e slots. I would like to go MSI, ASUS, or Gigabyte, but the prices for those are a bit more than ASRock, but they do have more slots and more features.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

I should have supersized the caps in the speaker crossover networks........

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I did end up finding a good board, for a good price. ASRock 970 EXTREME3. I have the option of going Bulldozer if I wanted to, there's USB3.0, SATA 6gb/s, and enough PCI-e slots and the arrangement of them to do everything I need (2-slot GPU, single-slot raid card, silicon image 3132 card, gigabit card).


edit: and in anticipation of getting the new parts sometime soon (before the 1st of the year), I've gone ahead and set my cache to 1 day instead of 10. Let my full cache scale down to a point where I can just set NNT, let the last two WUs finish, and then shut down this machine ID for good.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Good choice C_O
I have 870 extreme 3 and works like a charm.

BTW no need to run out of work.
I did it last year w/o problems.

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Good choice C_O
I have 870 extreme 3 and works like a charm.

BTW no need to run out of work.
I did it last year w/o problems.

I know, but I don't want to carry the computer ID over to the new build. I want to start from scratch, but I also don't want to just abandon/abort what I do have, either. So just run the cache down and start anew.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Good choice C_O
I have 870 extreme 3 and works like a charm.

BTW no need to run out of work.
I did it last year w/o problems.

I know, but I don't want to carry the computer ID over to the new build. I want to start from scratch, but I also don't want to just abandon/abort what I do have, either. So just run the cache down and start anew.

I dont know what you expect doing so.
I just copied Boinc to a different hard drive and after installing everthing i just put it back.

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Good choice C_O
I have 870 extreme 3 and works like a charm.

BTW no need to run out of work.
I did it last year w/o problems.

I know, but I don't want to carry the computer ID over to the new build. I want to start from scratch, but I also don't want to just abandon/abort what I do have, either. So just run the cache down and start anew.

I dont know what you expect doing so.
I just copied Boinc to a different hard drive and after installing everthing i just put it back.

Yeah, I've done that a dozen times on this machine when I re-deploy the Ghost image of a clean install. It's going to be a new machine though, so copying the data over is dumb.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Good choice C_O
I have 870 extreme 3 and works like a charm.

BTW no need to run out of work.
I did it last year w/o problems.

I know, but I don't want to carry the computer ID over to the new build. I want to start from scratch, but I also don't want to just abandon/abort what I do have, either. So just run the cache down and start anew.

I dont know what you expect doing so.
I just copied Boinc to a different hard drive and after installing everthing i just put it back.

Yeah, I've done that a dozen times on this machine when I re-deploy the Ghost image of a clean install. It's going to be a new machine though, so copying the data over is dumb.

Not if you have a couple hundred units in cache.
Of course you can do what you want.
Calling it dumb isn´t very polite.

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Good choice C_O
I have 870 extreme 3 and works like a charm.

BTW no need to run out of work.
I did it last year w/o problems.

I know, but I don't want to carry the computer ID over to the new build. I want to start from scratch, but I also don't want to just abandon/abort what I do have, either. So just run the cache down and start anew.

I dont know what you expect doing so.
I just copied Boinc to a different hard drive and after installing everthing i just put it back.

Yeah, I've done that a dozen times on this machine when I re-deploy the Ghost image of a clean install. It's going to be a new machine though, so copying the data over is dumb.

Not if you have a couple hundred units in cache.
Of course you can do what you want.
Calling it dumb isn´t very polite.

I know this, but my 10-day cache is 21 APs. It's not like I'm going to be dumping hundreds of WUs. A new machine with a new machine ID can't use WUs from the old machine, hence draining the cache down to empty versus a simple data copy.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

::random angry shouting:: Newegg deactivated the 1100T in favor of FX-6100. I was so close to having the money to order the new parts, and they're killing off Thuban. Guess it's not really all that terrible. Same clock speed, more L2 and L3, lower wattage.. oh, and lower price.

After doing some quick research, it looks like they really are just about identical in performance, too. Some tests Thuban has a slight lead, others Zambezi has a slight lead. Guess I'm going with the future on this one.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

::random angry shouting:: Newegg deactivated the 1100T in favor of FX-6100. I was so close to having the money to order the new parts, and they're killing off Thuban. Guess it's not really all that terrible. Same clock speed, more L2 and L3, lower wattage.. oh, and lower price.

After doing some quick research, it looks like they really are just about identical in performance, too. Some tests Thuban has a slight lead, others Zambezi has a slight lead. Guess I'm going with the future on this one.

Of course you have to change your mainboard as well.

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